


The Ocean's Promise

by endofthyme



Series: Witcher Works [3]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Selkies, At Least One Illustration, Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Eventual Romance, M/M, Misunderstandings, Nilfgaard, POV Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, POV Third Person Limited, Post-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Rating May Change, Secrets, Selkies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:01:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofthyme/pseuds/endofthyme
Summary: There was something disquieting about watching Ciri when she was near the ocean.
Relationships: Emhyr var Emreis/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: Witcher Works [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2046377
Comments: 20
Kudos: 54
Collections: Small FEAR 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written as part of the [Small FEAR 2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/smallfear2020/profile) accountability event! This isn't the fic I originally signed up to work on—maybe one day the world will see my Geralt/Emhyr assassination plot investigation fic—but I'm pretty pleased with what I've ended up with. Thanks so much to the_rck for keeping my writing momentum going, this past ~month and a half!
> 
> I've got 14k of this fic written so far. Geralt and Emhyr still haven't gotten any further than platonically touching hands, though, so… be forewarned! :)

There was something disquieting about watching Ciri when she was near the ocean. Geralt hadn't often had a chance to see her like this—Kaer Morhen was hundreds of miles inland, and the sea was nothing but a memory there. But he remembered what Yennefer had told him about Ciri's time in Aretuza, and Ermion and Crach an Craite had both recounted to Geralt how she'd stood on the shores of Skellige as a child, just looking out desolately at the waves. They'd thought she missed her parents, who, as far as anyone knew at the time, had died together in a shipwreck on their way to the Isles. And maybe grief was all it had been.

But sometimes her eyes grew dark and not quite human, for just a moment, when she was reminded of those vast waters. Nothing overt, of course. Nothing that couldn't be explained away as a trick of the light, if you weren't as attuned to these things as witchers had to be. 

Geralt saw the signs, but didn't have even a guess about what she was, and he never brought it up. None of them had. Just taught her what she needed to know to survive, and made sure she knew not all monsters were monsters and not all magic was to be feared.

It wasn't until years later, when he was reading an old bestiary that got more things wrong than not, that he learned what a selkie was and about the long-forgotten legends that had surrounded them. When he first read the name, he assumed it was a bastardization of 'selkiemore,' but it soon became clear it was describing another creature entirely. Maybe the selkie had been the origin of the name selkiemore—or selkie maw, as some called it—and that name was the last trace that remained of the selkie in the collective memory of humanity.

The book said selkies were creatures of the ocean that ordinarily looked like seals but could take human form by shedding their skin. It claimed selkies only took the form of beautiful women, but it claimed the same thing about succubi without even a mention of incubi, so Geralt would take that with a grain of salt. According to legend, human men, usually fishermen, would fall instantly in love upon finding selkies in their naked human form on the beach and they would be driven to the worst sorts of covetous behavior, stealing and hiding the sealskin that would allow the object of their affection to leave them and return to the sea. Without fail, though often after years of marriage and the bearing of children, the selkie would find their pelt and disappear without a word back into the ocean from whence they came.

The skin thing was new to Geralt. Dopplers could lose bits of themselves in their transformations, but they didn't need those bits back to keep changing shape. And, sure, lamias were shapeshifters who shed their skin sometimes, but only in the same way any snake did.

Honestly, it sounded like the sort of fairytale that people would come up with to explain perfectly ordinary events like people in a fishing village drowning with their bodies never being found, or fishermen's unhappy wives running off to find lives with more prospects. Geralt had encountered stories of that ilk often enough, and he understood the drive to come up with any kind of explanation, no matter how absurd and convoluted. But the image of Ciri's wide, dark eyes, the irises utterly filling the whites, flashed in his mind before he could dismiss it entirely. Were they seal eyes, maybe?

He couldn't find anything actionable in the book, like what the _signs_ of a selkie truly were. Did they react to silver? Did they have any notable strengths or weaknesses, aside from their skin? Was it hereditary like with werewolves and other therianthropes—were the children selkies, too? The book hadn't been written by a witcher and it showed. He couldn't find any actual witcher accounts of an encounter with a selkie anywhere either, no lovelorn husbands begging for help finding their seaward-fled wives. If selkies were real and still existed in the world, they'd been keeping themselves well-hidden. Perhaps for good reason.

And if Ciri _was_ a selkie, then… He thought of the capital of Cintra, built right where the Yaruga flowed into the North Sea, and imagined a line of kings and queens that ruled always from within sight of the water, wielding all the authority they needed to guard their pelts and keep them secret. He thought of Queen Calanthe, who'd have given up her skin and her power to no man living. And he felt the tiniest glimmering of hope at the thought that maybe Pavetta had escaped Emhyr that stormy night so many years before. That, just maybe, Ciri's mother might still be alive out there somewhere in the deep.

And if Ciri _did_ have a sealskin of her own, Geralt would bet anything Emhyr was the one who had it locked up tight somewhere, another layer of insurance against his daughter ever leaving his side again.

Ciri had gone to Nilfgaard with Emhyr about a year ago now. But she'd extended Geralt an invitation with no time limit, so he started slowly working his way south, taking contracts as he went and trying to figure out what the hell he should do or say about his theory.

It was only a theory, even if it did seem to fit. That bestiary had contained more fictitious beasts than factual, after all. And even if selkies were real, maybe those descended from selkies weren't selkies themselves, and had the eyes and the sea-longing without the sealskin. He didn't want to bring up the possibility to Ciri when it might not be remotely true. And he couldn't let a word of his suspicions reach Emhyr if it was—Ciri's pelt would be taken instantly out of reach. He'd have to just nose around at first, see if he could find any leads. Emhyr would keep it close, he suspected, under lock and key.

\---

Ciri seemed happy when he showed up, if surprised that he'd actually taken her up on the offer. Geralt felt a bit bad about that. If it hadn't been for that book, he probably wouldn't have, at least not for a good long while—unless she happened to need his help. Though, he supposed he _was_ in fact here trying to figure out if she did.

She showed him around the City of Golden Towers, pointing out libraries and hospitals and theaters and monuments. He got a chance to observe her at the docks, her preternatural stillness as she looked out at the water. Her eyes in profile seemed their normal color when he looked at them head-on, but in the periphery of his vision…

He cleared his throat, and clear, bright, _human,_ emerald-green eyes snapped towards him. "Oh, sorry!" Ciri said. "Ready to head back?"

"Sure," Geralt shrugged. "Guess I've seen all the sights?"

"Not half!" Ciri said, laughingly. "But enough for your first day in the city, I think."

They took their time walking back to the palace, chatting about all the things Ciri had spent the past year learning: languages, etiquette, dancing, economics, strategy, and more. Ciri asked about the Path and Geralt told her some of the more interesting stories. But, too soon, they passed through the palace gates and, before Geralt could blink, Ciri got whisked away back to her lessons, with a promise to see him for lunch the next day, or maybe dinner.

In the meantime, Geralt got put up in a room, where he started to put together a plan of attack. He'd figured out the basic layout of the palace; he'd just have to go over it with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any suspiciously well-guarded or locked rooms. And he'd have to look like he was poking around aimlessly out of curiosity and boredom, rather than like he was casing the joint.

So he wandered the halls each day, leaving his swords and armor in his room and putting on the least absurd of the Nilfgaardian outfits they supplied for him. He stopped to frown at paintings and tapestries and let people engage him in conversation. He took books out onto balconies and into well-lit alcoves and used them as cover for observing the guards' rotations. And he had meals with Ciri, whenever she was free.

He didn't encounter many familiar faces, though Ambassador var Attre turned out to be around, and he spotted Morvran Voorhis chatting earnestly with Ciri about something one day, out in the gardens. She looked more amused by his enthusiasm than anything, but when Geralt brought it up later, she got cagey, and would only say that they were starting to get to know each other, before she changed the subject.

He ran into Emhyr himself a few times, and the emperor was cordial enough towards him, but Geralt wasn't exactly ready to make smalltalk with the guy, suspecting what he suspected. He gave single-word responses and made ill-mannered escapes in order to get back to his search.

He'd been at it for a fortnight before he cracked it. The southeastern tower. It wasn't any more heavily guarded than any of the other towers along the perimeter of the palace, but its entrance was much more defensible. From outside the building it wasn't noticeably different, but the angles of visibility you could get on the hallways when you were guarding the door were substantially better. If Geralt was going to pick somewhere in the palace to hide something important and guard it well with as few people as possible, that tower would be his first choice.

The guards had gotten used to him walking where he pleased around the place, so they let him get far too close before they started to protest. Geralt hit them with axii and said he was there on Emhyr's orders. They let him in.

He found an unassuming strongbox at the top of the tower. He snapped the lock, opened it, then reached in to grab hold of the furry material—the sealskin—that he found inside.

Only to falter when he realized there were two.

The one he was pretty sure belonged to Ciri was smooth as silk, a light grey, well-cared-for, while this other one was darker and more bulky, and the years hadn't treated it kindly—it was battered as hell, with patches of fur missing in places. He felt the tiny flame of hope he'd nursed for Pavetta's survival gutter. Emhyr had kept Pavetta's pelt from her and she'd drowned for it. And now he was keeping his daughter's, too, even knowing what consequences might follow.

Geralt pulled Ciri's pelt free, draping it over his arm, but he took a moment to apologetically run his hand over the other one, careful not to do more damage. Maybe if he'd known, he could've done more, back then.

He was most of the way down the winding steps of the tower when he heard the clanging of armor from below. There were at least ten palace guards coming up the steps. Either the guards on the door had shaken off the axii too soon or he'd tripped some magical alarm unknowingly. He turned and ran back up to the top floor, where there'd been a window he was pretty sure he could squeeze through. Maybe he could catch himself on the walls on the way down and survive the fall, at least to the battlements below. But he only managed to get halfway out the window with Ciri's pelt before they caught his feet and dragged him back in. 

He didn't resist when they took the pelt from him, afraid they'd damage it, and he saw them shove it back into the strongbox. He _did_ resist when they clapped him in dimeritium shackles, but it didn't matter. 

He was hauled through the palace in chains. He caught Ciri's surprised eyes across a courtyard and in a sudden flash of magic, she was next to them, keeping pace with the guards' marching, the front of her skirts bunched up in one hand. "Unhand him!" she ordered.

None of them even slowed down. "Apologies, Your Highness, but we must take him to the emperor," the guard nearest her said.

Ciri made a noise of frustration. "Geralt, what's _happening?_ I felt a strange… and then Emhyr sent me away, told me to lock myself in my room!"

Urgently, Geralt said, "Probably should've told you, but I didn't know for sure until—" And then he got pushed face-first through a door and shoved to his knees in front of Emperor Emhyr var Emreis.

The highest-ranking guardsman stepped forward and saluted. "Your Majesty, we caught this man attempting to steal from the southeastern tower and brought him here, as ordered."

Ciri had followed them in and circled around so she could see both Geralt and Emhyr. _'Steal?'_ she mouthed at Geralt, bewildered.

"And the objects are still secure? Both of them?" Emhyr said, his hands behind his back and his gaze fixed on Geralt.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

Emhyr nodded sharply, then said in a conversational tone, "I imagine it was sentiment rather than blackmail that possessed you, witcher."

Geralt didn't think it would be a good idea to let too many people hear this, for Ciri's sake. "You really wanna talk in front of the guards?" He shifted his weight from one knee to the other.

Emhyr didn't bat an eye. "Leave us," he said, and the guards started to file out immediately. "Cirilla, you as well."

"The hell I will," Ciri burst out. "What's going on?!"

"Ciri stays," Geralt agreed. "She deserves to know."

Emhyr was silent for a long moment. "I had hoped for a somewhat less… dramatic circumstance for it, but very well," he said at last. He sighed, then his head tilted inquisitively. "How did you learn of it? You didn't seem aware before."

It was his calmness, his acceptance about being caught, his complete lack of remorse that set Geralt off. Geralt's sense of regret over Pavetta's avoidable death morphed into true anger at Emhyr's part in it, burning through any bit of pity he could muster for the idea of a parent doing whatever was in their power to keep their child from flying too far out of reach. "Learn what?" he growled, pushing himself up to his feet with his bound hands. "That you took Pavetta's skin to keep her with you, and you let her die to suit yourself—" Emhyr flinched, eyes widening, and Geralt felt a vicious sort of satisfaction at breaking his composure. "—and that now you're doing the same damn thing to Ciri?!"

"That's—" Emhyr tried to interject, gaze darting to his daughter.

Geralt barreled onward. "She already agreed to stay, just like you wanted! What, did you need one last magical backup plan, to trap her here?" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ciri take a step back.

"Witcher, be silent!" Emhyr hissed. He turned towards Ciri, taking on a beseeching air. "Cirilla, Geralt is mistaken. I can explain everything, to _both_ of your satisfactions, just let me—" He looked to the door and then back to her, torn. "Give me a moment to—"

And in that time, Emhyr would have Ciri's pelt hidden away again somewhere else, where neither of them would be able to find it. "Ciri, the top floor of the southeastern tower, go, get the light grey pelt and take it somewhere safe, that's the most important thing, don't worry about me, I'll be fine," Geralt rattled off as fast as he could.

"Cirilla, do _not—"_

Her gaze flicked from Emhyr to Geralt and back and then in an instant, she'd teleported out of the room.

Emhyr had been reaching for her, but his hands closed on empty air. He whirled on Geralt. _"Damn you, witcher,"_ he said, feelingly. He made an aborted move towards the door, but there was no way he or any of his guards could get there in time to stop her.

"You owe her the choice! You can't just keep her fucking _skin_ from her!"

"It's not a choice!" Emhyr snarled, stalking towards Geralt and grabbing hold of the collar of his shirt, face twisted into a mask of animal rage. "When your hands are on those blighted things, there is no choice, no reason, no decision. There is only the _sea."_

Geralt's hands instinctively went up to grasp Emhyr's, keeping them still. "What—"

And then the emperor's head snapped to the southeast, his grip loosening and his expression going blank and intent. Inches away, Geralt watched as his eyes changed, the already dark brown filling with a liquid, inky blackness, and the white following suit.

Geralt counted five long seconds, then ten, before Emhyr's face crumpled, showing more emotion than he'd ever seen from the man before. It lasted only a moment, the length of one shuddering breath, before he turned back to Geralt with his eyes still black and his jaw tight, to confirm aloud the truth that Geralt was now coming to realize.

"Pavetta gave Cirilla the Elder Blood, witcher," he said. _"I_ gave her _this."_

Emhyr pulled his hands free and stepped back, turning away from Geralt.

"And now you have meddled in affairs you knew nothing about," he said, "and taken my daughter from me a second time. I hope you are satisfied."

Geralt tried to form a response. "If _you're_ the… why would you…"

Emhyr was the selkie. The second, tattered pelt in that strongbox had been _Emhyr's._ Did that mean Pavetta was the one who…? No, that didn't make any sense. He couldn't see Emhyr giving up his skin to her when he wouldn't give up even his name. And he couldn't see Pavetta using underhanded means to keep hold of Emhyr—that had been what _Emhyr_ had done, which was why it had fit so well for it to have been the other way around. 

But no further explanations or details were forthcoming from Emhyr's stiff back.

From outside the door and far down the hall, there was the sound of heavy boots running at a fast clip, plate armor clanging back and forth. It came closer and closer, then the runner skidded to a halt and started hammering on the door, shouting, "Your Majesty!"

"Enter," Emhyr said.

A panting guardsman surged inside, snapping off a perfect salute even though the emperor wasn't looking his way. "Your Majesty, Princess Cirilla—we were keeping watch at the top of the tower, in case of accomplices, and she just _appeared_ and—Your Majesty, she's taken one of the, the artifacts!" A handful of other guards hovered in the doorway, looking keen for orders, in a terrified sort of way.

Emhyr turned. His lips were a thin, unsurprised line, and his eyes were dark, but human. "Quite," he said. He gestured at Geralt. "Take this man to the dungeon."

Geralt didn't bother putting up a fight.

\---

He spent three days locked in a cell beneath the Imperial Palace of Nilfgaard. The guards left the dimeritium on, but they detached the chain at least, so he could move his arms freely. The chafing on his wrists was annoying, but, hey, they were feeding him well, and not even just well for a dungeon. The servants who brought him meals were even still calling him 'your lordship' without a hint of irony, like he remained an honored guest. They brought him books, too, so he wasn't climbing up the walls with boredom, and the cell was warm and dry and well-lit. He'd been put up in far worse rooms at _inns_ in the North.

The thing was, he knew he'd told Ciri he'd be okay, and he _was,_ but… he'd have kind of expected her to come back anyway and rescue him before long. What could be keeping her?

The image of Emhyr's bared teeth, spittle flying, popped into his head. What had Emhyr said about those pelts? _'There is only the sea.'_

A shiver ran down Geralt's spine. He shook his head. No, Ciri had probably taken her pelt through a portal to another world, somewhere utterly beyond Emhyr's reach. _He_ knew how unpredictable that could be. She'd probably just gotten into a minor scrape or was having trouble finding someplace that wasn't an apocalyptic mess to stow it. That was all.

On the evening of the third day, Emhyr showed up. 

Geralt had been sitting on his cot reading, so he raised expectant eyebrows at his visitor while he very obviously folded down the corner of the page to mark his place.

Emhyr looked at him like he was a barbarian, and Geralt smirked insouciantly, setting the book aside. "Can I help you with something, Your Majesty?"

"Evidently not," Emhyr said after a moment, in subdued tones. "It has been three days. It is folly to continue to hope that if I keep you here, she might one day return for you. She is my daughter, and I know that she will not. You are free to go, I will not keep you."

Geralt blinked and felt the urge to protest, even though it likely wouldn't be in his best interests to do so. "She would've taken it to another world; she's probably still bouncing around trying to find a safe place for it."

"No, witcher," Emhyr said. He looked weary, like he'd given up. _"It_ has taken _her_ to another world. Into the depths and beyond our reach."

Geralt stood and stalked towards the bars between them. Something about Emhyr's exhausted stillness was making him itch to move, to _act._ "If you really think that, couldn't you go after her? _You've_ got one, too."

Emhyr's hackles went up, and for some reason, for just a brief moment, that made Geralt feel better. "And give up what I've built here?" the emperor said, scathingly. "If I go to the ocean, I will not return. Just as she will not. You would do well to accept that."

And with that, he swept away, before the guards came in to unlock Geralt's cell and let him out of the shackles.

Geralt walked back to the room they'd given him, rubbing his wrists and trying to suppress the urge to set things on fire just because he _could_ now. When he arrived, he found all of his things still there, not confiscated or anything. He looked out the window. It was dark already, and he could barely see the light of the moon through the clouds, which looked like a rainstorm waiting to happen. He wasn't champing at the bit to hit the road in that, and Emhyr _had_ said he was 'free to go,' not 'get the hell out of my palace before I have you thrown out,' so…

He plopped himself down on the bed, which was much nicer than the dungeon cot, and stared at the ceiling.

What Emhyr had described—and Geralt was using the word 'described' in its loosest possible sense here—sounded like some kind of irresistible compulsion. But it didn't add up. If all selkies ever wanted was to go to the ocean and never return, why would they ever come ashore and risk getting themselves held captive? And _some_ selkie in Emhyr's family tree must have come from the sea, rather than being born on land to a selkie parent. That meant there had to be a way back, if Ciri really had gone. And since there _was_ a way, she'd find it.

That certainty and the soft patter of raindrops carried him off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this idea at 2:38am one night and sent my friend the following text message immediately before I passed out: "I mean realistically speaking as far as the narrative is concerned Pavetta is the more likely candidate for selkiehood but damn what if Emhyr has his and Ciri's pelts in a chest somewhere."
> 
> That turned into this, and here we are now. Hope you enjoyed chapter 1! :D


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kept using aquatic turns of phrase in this chapter, because my brain decided that would be hilarious to do in my very serious selkie AU. There's not _that_ many—eleven by my last count, in a chapter that's, woof, over 5k—but they're there! See if you can spot them, haha. And enjoy!

The guard who warily answered Geralt's friendly greeting the next morning _boggled_ when he asked where he could find the emperor. Geralt wasn't really sure what the hell he was thinking either, but he didn't want to leave things where they were, and maybe he could coax some more answers out of Emhyr that might lead him to some way to help Ciri find her way back. It was worth a shot.

Emhyr was at the desk in his office, staring off into space. He didn't acknowledge his visitor's entrance, though presumably he'd had to agree that Geralt should be allowed in to see him. There weren't even any guards.

"Look," Geralt said, seeing no point waiting to wade in, "I'm sorry, I may have been a little hasty and made some assumptions. It was just witcher instincts. But it still feels like it was the right thing to do, more or less. I don't know why you're so sure she won't, but Ciri's strong as hell, and she's beaten all sorts of odds. I think she'll come back just fine."

Emhyr stirred a little, but he didn't respond to Geralt's attempt at reassurance, just went right on staring at the wall.

Staring west, in the direction of the ocean, Geralt realized, with a curl of unease. But the strange seal eyes weren't in evidence, only hooded brown ones. And if suddenly all Geralt could smell was salt-spray, well, this was a port city after all. It was to be expected. He shouldn't let it rattle him.

For long, strained moments, the silence stretched between them. "And how do you even know?" Geralt burst out, to break it, to break _something._ "How do you know that if you touch the pelt you can't come back from it? You can't have ever _done_ it."

When Emhyr spoke, it was absently. Like he wasn't actually there, not really. "I have," he said. "Once."

"What? But you're still here! So Ciri could—"

"I was obstructed by forces outside my control. There was nothing to hold Cirilla back."

Geralt started shaking his head, though he wasn't sure exactly what he was denying. There wasn't anything that could stand between Ciri and getting anywhere she damn well wanted, he knew that. "That's not…"

"You should not trouble yourself so with the hows and wherefores." Emhyr's voice was distant and musing, and he still wasn't looking at Geralt. "It is done. And, in truth, I blame myself. As you said, you were only doing what came naturally to you, as a witcher. And I _was_ keeping secrets from her. I might have foreseen that even the barest outline of the truth, coming from your mouth, would have been more damning than I might have been able to present it. That she would trust your word and your direction, rather than mine."

The emperor grimaced. "I would have spoken to her about it. When the time seemed right. You might doubt my sincerity; I admit I had ample opportunity this past year, and always I faltered. But certainly I would have before she married.

"She does not have my ambition, you see, nor was she brought up to understand her duty to the empire, as I was. I had hoped that over time I would become convinced that she was truly committed, and not likely to disappear into the ether at my first false move."

"'Wrong move,' you mean?" Geralt said. It came out a little rough.

Emhyr was silent.

Geralt exhaled. "You can't hang on to people by lying to them. Haven't you learned that by now?"

Still far away, Emhyr said, "It seems to work well, until the moment that it does not. But perhaps you're right."

No _perhaps_ about it. But what the fuck ever. "I don't think she would've run just because you told her she was a selkie."

Emhyr's brow furrowed, and he finally turned his head to look Geralt's way. "A selkie?" he asked. The word had an awkward, unpracticed sound in his mouth. "Is that what I am?"

Geralt blinked. "You don't _know?"_

Emhyr shook his head. "My father simply referred to it as 'our family's burden.' In his darker moments, he called it our curse—but having been cursed, I am loath to compare it. Are there others like us out there?"

"I'm… not sure," Geralt said. Haltingly, still not quite believing Emhyr didn't already know all of it, he explained what he knew of selkies from that old bestiary—basically amounting to nothing but tragic bedtime stories about fishermen and their selkie wives—and that he'd only connected the idea to Ciri because it had seemed to fit with her reactions to the sea.

Emhyr took all of this in without comment, and then when Geralt finally tapered off, he said contemplatively, "And since you knew her true origin… naturally, I was cast in the role of the villainous captor."

"Well," Geralt said, shifting uncomfortably. "Yeah. Did you expect any different?"

"No," Emhyr said. Then he huffed out a humorless laugh. "Perhaps if you'd known more of Nilfgaard's ecological regulations, you might have guessed it was I and not Pavetta who was a selkie."

"Why's that?"

"Seal hunting was declared illegal in the Nilfgaardian empire and any vassal states it might acquire, dating back at least several hundred years," Emhyr informed him, which… yeah, that would probably have done it. 

"I thought at first that you must have uncovered the var Emreis line's secret somehow," Emhyr went on, "and therefore you knew that both I and Cirilla were affected. I believed your motive to be protecting Cirilla from the possibility of my harming her pelt, which is tied inextricably to her. We feel the pain of damage inflicted to it, you see, and may even die of it." Geralt recalled the sorry state that the darker pelt in that strongbox had been in, and wondered, but Emhyr didn't pause to elaborate. "I saw the logic in guarding against that, although I would not have done such a thing. I was unfamiliar with these legends, so I had no reason to guess what you truly suspected. What the pelt is to me is a vulnerability and a distraction, not a proxy for freedom."

Emhyr stood and walked to the window, which faced not towards the ocean but rather looked out over the sun-gold rooftops of the city. "Thank you, witcher," he said. "It… helps, to understand the tangled strands of fate that have led me to ruin."

Irritation flared in Geralt's gut. He wasn't here to give Emhyr _closure_ —he was here for Ciri, wherever she was. "Because it's all about you," he said.

"Cirilla is gone. My legacy now ends with me."

It hadn't even been a week. "It's been _four days."_

"Four or four-hundred, it matters not. You may go."

Geralt slammed the door on his way out.

\---

He staked out a space for himself in the imperial library and got to work. Geralt was in the one place in the world that he knew for certain any selkies had ever lived, so he reasoned he'd probably have a better chance finding something useful here than anywhere else.

They wouldn't let him eat or drink near the books, and they flatly refused to let him read alone by candlelight after the time in the evening when the librarians put out all the lanterns and headed to bed. Demonstrating that he was capable of both lighting and extinguishing open flames with a flick of his wrist didn't seem to help matters. So he did have to pause his efforts every so often for sustenance and sleep.

He initially took a look at their bestiaries and books of folklore, but they didn't have much that he hadn't read before, so he was able to clear through the stack on the first day. After that, he threw his net wider.

He searched for records of disappearances, miraculous reappearances, and missing persons found, particularly focusing on members of the royal family, as well as the other noble houses of Nilfgaard, since he presumed they intermarried pretty regularly. There were a few disappearances that caught his eye, of members of branch families to the var Emreis house for the most part. Geralt inferred that those had been presumed politically-motivated murders at the time, from how sparsely-detailed those records were in comparison to others—as though the investigators had tried very hard not to openly speculate. Or perhaps the var Emreis house had applied pressure to prevent any speculation… which would've _made_ the investigators presume politically-motivated murder.

The reappearances of missing nobles were less promising, however, and consisted largely of ultimately-discovered attempts to escape debt or commit fraud. In all the cases Geralt could find, their whereabouts for the time they spent in the wind had been assiduously accounted for—extended stints in the ocean were unlikely.

Just to cover all of his possible leads, he poked at the legal records, too, to try confirming exactly how far back that seal hunting law went. It was older than the hundred-some years of records they had on hand; he'd have to specifically request access to the collection at the judiciary to go back any further.

After that, there wasn't much he could think to do but try to parse any useful information out of some firsthand accounts. The var Emreises seemed allergic to writing journals, unfortunately. He did find some collected letters of theirs and some journals from close contemporaries and things like that, but thus far they had all turned out both tedious and unhelpful.

It was his fifth day holed up in the library, and he'd just started in on the diary of a courtesan rumored to have been Emhyr's great-grandfather's lover, as both a palette cleanser for himself and a bit of a reward—even just the first few paragraphs were, ah, _stimulating_ as hell.

But, alas, before he got much further, he heard a bunch of the librarians shuffling out of the main entrance all of a sudden, even though it was hours before closing time. He turned the page, figuring they would've come to tell him if they wanted him to leave. Although… He sighed. The footsteps headed his way probably belonged to someone coming to do just that.

They paused a short distance away, and then Emhyr's voice inquired, "What is it that you're looking for, witcher?"

Geralt rolled his head back over the armrest of the bench he'd laid himself out on—for more comfortable reading—and looked upside-down at the emperor. He set down the diary spine-up on his chest. "Whatever else I can find on selkies," he said.

Emhyr looked dubiously at the book. "In that awful tripe?" He shook his head. "It was a closely-guarded secret, conveyed only by word of mouth. Nothing was written down."

Geralt shrugged. "I've found plenty of secrets written down. Sometimes between the lines, but still. People don't always realize they're doing it." He scooped up the diary and put it back up over his face.

Emhyr's startlingly-warm hands took hold of the book and pulled it free of Geralt's grasp with a gentle but implacable pressure. He set it down on the table next to Geralt's bench. "You should not hold a book that way. It damages the binding," he offered, in explanation. Then he took three steps over to the next bench, along the adjoining wall.

Geralt pushed himself up, feet still dangling over the other armrest, and watched Emhyr sit down on the wooden slats with all the grace and gravitas of an emperor ascending his throne.

Emhyr regarded Geralt with a calm solemnity. "What do you wish to know?" he asked. "I will tell you whatever I can recall."

Geralt swung his feet to the floor and sat up properly. He wasn't about to have an actual useful conversation half-horizontal. "How far back does it go? Do you know who the first selkie in your family was?"

"My grandfather's grandfather was a selkie. And he did not spring forth from the waves, so one of his parents must have been as well. Further back than that, I cannot say for certain."

The way Emhyr had placed his emphasis on 'for certain' in that last part kind of begged the question: "But…?"

_"But,"_ Emhyr said, "I suspect it goes back many generations further. Do you know what 'Emreis' means?" He waited for Geralt to shake his head. "In a very old, now-dead branch language to modern Nilfgaardian, it meant 'risen from the sea.'"

"You're kidding," Geralt said.

Emhyr only looked at him, and, of course he wasn't, he didn't know how.

"Sure. Fine. And it was just the direct var Emreis line that were selkies, as far as any of you knew? You weren't aware of anyone else?"

The emperor's face went perfectly blank. "I had some cousins with the same burden. All were killed by the Usurper."

Geralt winced a little. "Right. Um. And what about. There weren't any…" What was the _polite_ way that people sometimes put it? "…wild oats?"

Emhyr didn't seem to appreciate Geralt's attempt at delicacy. He gave him a look of disfavor and said, in clipped tones, "One tends to be more careful with one's dalliances when the child will emerge swaddled in sealskin."

Geralt wasn't _necessarily_ convinced that was the case, but he let it go. He had all the information he was going to get: if there were any bastard selkies around, Emhyr didn't know about them, and harping on it wouldn't help. Especially because Emhyr looked as if he was starting to question why he'd agreed to this. Honestly, Geralt wasn't quite sure why Emhyr had either—but probably it had just taken him a few days to come around about giving up on Ciri. Better late than never. It was looking like Geralt would have to change tacks if he wanted to _keep_ Emhyr on the line, though. "Alright, well, thanks. Those are the general questions out of the way. How about you…" He gestured encouragingly with one hand. "…just start telling me the basics, and I'll see if there's any threads I can pull on."

With a little prompting, Emhyr laid bare his childhood experiences of selkiehood for Geralt's perusal. Some of his earliest memories were of being taught to control his reaction to the sea, but it wasn't until he was ten years old that the family's secret had been explained to him in its entirety by his parents. He mostly only had himself and his father's experiences to go on, though. His grandfather had died before he was born, and he hadn't interacted much with the selkie cousins he'd mentioned before—they'd all been either much older or much younger than him. Geralt didn't press him for further details on that front. Younger than Emhyr had been, _much_ younger… Geralt was fiercely glad that the Usurper was dust under Emhyr's floor now.

Emhyr also told him that, to his knowledge, none of those that ever _had_ been tempted into the ocean had ever returned. Geralt chose not to point out that Emhyr didn't even know how far back this went. He'd only been able to conclusively say that five generations of his family had been selkies—six, counting Ciri—and that wasn't terribly many people, all told. So Geralt just nodded and changed the subject, disregarding that completely. The sample size was way too small to draw any conclusions about Ciri's chances.

A conversational turn or so later, Emhyr had gone on to talking about how his family had guarded their pelts when he was young. "My father loved my mother dearly," he said, lost in thought. "He gave his pelt over to her entirely, letting her hide it out of his reach, as the years went on and the pull grew stronger."

Geralt made a mental note of that: the ocean's call got less easily resistible over time, as selkies aged. But Emhyr knew exactly where his pelt was—no one was hiding it for him—and he was getting to around the age Fergus var Emreis had been when he'd been, well, usurped. Did Emhyr have more self-control? Was his father just more cautious? More concerned?

"He couldn't bear the possibility that his nature might induce him to abandon her, or I, their child. And he had no doubt in his mind that she would never use it to cause him harm. And indeed she never did, to the last. I…" He paused, swallowed. "I never allowed Pavetta to put hands on my pelt. Although I knew she loved me, and although I _believed_ I loved her, I could not countenance trusting her with my weaknesses _or_ my secrets."

Emhyr's voice had gone quiet. Geralt was shifting closer before he even realized he was doing it—even though his witcher ears would've been able to hear Emhyr just fine even if he'd gone quieter still—and his knee bumped into Emhyr's.

The emperor tensed at the contact and pulled back, looking down at the floor. Geralt opened his mouth—to apologize, maybe—but the look on Emhyr's face stopped him. His lips were just barely turned up on one side, in a rueful smile that was like broken glass, and he said, "You have not repeated your accusations from that day. About Pavetta." 

It took Geralt a second. "About you… stealing her skin?"

"About me being at fault for her death."

Geralt felt cold suddenly, like he did whenever the monster who came out of the mists wasn't the one he'd prepared for. "Are you?"

Emhyr looked back up at him. "She _drowned,"_ he said, in the same way one would say 'of _course.'_ But somehow Geralt didn't think he quite meant 'yes.'

"And… you could have rescued her, with the pelt?" Geralt guessed. And therefore… he could bring back Ciri, if he tried? Was that what Emhyr was going for? He'd seemed so convinced before that he couldn't.

"I kept my pelt with me on the ship, close to hand. It would have been the work of a moment to pull it free of the shroud I'd wrapped it in. I _ached_ to do so, as I have for little else in my life. I heard the ocean making promises to me—it was all I could hear. Honeyed words, desperate pleas. Telling me I would be able to save Pavetta, drag her to shore, if only I came _home."_ He grimaced. "I shut my ears to it. But it never disappears, only ebbs. Even now it is calling me, telling me I could be with Cirilla again, now and forever. All I would have to do is just… _go."_

He was looking at Geralt significantly, like he was trying to convey some other point to Geralt as well, without just fucking saying it out loud. And maybe a bit like he was testing Geralt for something.

"That's _good,"_ Geralt tried, offering up a lifeline of hope for getting Ciri back. "Maybe we can use that."

Emhyr's lips flattened out, so Geralt assumed he'd missed the mark.

He stumbled through a couple probably-incoherent sentences trying to explain what he meant, but it was hard to take hundreds of years of witchers' collected knowledge and learned intuition on how to break curses and work around unfathomably ancient magic and compress that on-the-fly into a form digestible by an outsider—even one who'd had to deal with quite a complicated curse himself. And then Geralt had to stop himself before he got anywhere useful anyway, right in the middle of sentence number three, because he heard the main library door creak open and shuffling steps start coming their way.

Wide eyes framed by ginger hair peeked cautiously through the shelves. Their owner squeaked in surprise upon finding Geralt looking back at her, and then she fled back to the safety of the halls. Looked like the other librarians had sent the least senior among them to check if the two of them were still there.

"I think they probably want us out of here," Geralt said, bemused.

"It is my library. I may do what I please with it," Emhyr said, but he stood up nevertheless, conceding, "However, I believe it _is_ time for the evening meal. Would you care to join me? And perhaps we could speak more."

He said it easily, as though he hadn't just spent the last, what, hour and a half or two, just sitting across from Geralt on a wooden bench and telling him things that he'd probably never told anyone else before in his life. Things he hadn't even known the word for a week ago. But then they'd both do a lot, for Ciri. They had that much in common, even if they always went about it so very differently.

"Sure," Geralt said, and he fell into step just behind Emhyr as the man led him directly to the part of the palace where—as Geralt had determined during his two weeks spent surveying the place—Emhyr's chambers lay. He hadn't ever tried to get a look inside. Ciri breakfasted there with Emhyr regularly, getting advice and instruction on things to bear in mind for her days' tutelage, and Geralt had assumed Emhyr wouldn't keep her pelt somewhere she went with any frequency. He felt faintly vindicated that his instincts had been proven correct, even if things had turned out a bit more complicated than he'd thought.

They passed by the stone-faced guards on the door and Geralt took a quick glance around the room they'd entered. It wasn't any _more_ fancy than the rest of the palace. Dark wood paneling on the walls. A few paintings, landscapes—and Geralt noted that there weren't any bodies of water in sight in any of them. And sure, there was golden detailing on everything—the ceiling, the sideboards, the table and chairs, even the bookshelves. Nothing was _solid_ gold, though, he thought. He looked at the fixtures on the walls that curled up like gilded vines to hold aloft warmly glowing glass orbs within delicate golden cages, filling the room with a light that didn't waver the way flames tended to. _Those_ were probably solid gold, other than the glowing bits, he revised. But he'd seen them in Ciri's rooms as well. So he wasn't impressed, overall, although he didn't think Emhyr cared to impress him particularly.

There were two doors, besides the one they'd come through, and Geralt assumed one of them led to Emhyr's bedroom. This was just the outermost room of his chambers, meant to receive guests.

The table, with its thin traceries of gold trailing down the legs and along the edge of its skirt, already had an array of foods set out on it, and it didn't look like they'd been sitting out long. There was steam still rising off of some of the dishes, the ones that were meant to be served hot. And also… there was an extra place set for Geralt already. He wondered, not for the first time, if the servants were precognisant or something, because he'd walked straight here with Emhyr, who hadn't so much as spoken to anyone much less given any orders, after the emperor had _just_ invited him to dinner in a room where no witnesses had been present.

Geralt put it aside and picked up a ladle. He served himself a small bowl of soup made of something orange, out of a silver tureen with flowers embossed on it, and then he sat down across from where Emhyr had, to start drinking it. He was vaguely aware there were some kind of etiquette things he was ignoring, but Emhyr should have known what he was getting into, inviting a witcher to dinner. And the soup had been on the wrong side of the table from him. What was he supposed to do?

He was on his second plate—he'd been planning to have a late lunch and then kind of gotten caught up in things—before Emhyr spoke up.

"The food is to your liking, then?"

Geralt swallowed a mouthful of bread. "Sure," he said, raising his eyebrows at Emhyr, who was eating at a much more sedate pace.

"And the library?" Emhyr's gaze alternated between his guest and the chunk of meat he was slicing up thinly and methodically. "The collection has been sufficient for your needs?"

Was Emhyr trying to make smalltalk? "Uh," Geralt said. "Well, I haven't found anything immediately useful yet, but the collection's pretty substantial. No complaints there. It's well-organized, too. Though they did lump together the accurate bestiaries with the bullshit ones."

"I shall have to mention that to Master Ulfert," Emhyr said, and Geralt imagined the stiff-necked head librarian, on imperial orders, frantically trying to determine the relative accuracy of Tezelar's _On the Monsters of the North_ versus Delmacchia's _Animalia._ He would definitely get it wrong. Geralt doubted any of the librarians employed in the palace had ever seen a ghoul, let alone a cockatrice.

"Only if you let me watch," Geralt said, grinning. "Pretty sure he thinks all of them are bullshit." At least, that was the impression he had gotten from all the huffing and sighing the man had done a few days back when Geralt had been sifting through them.

"I will impress upon him the reality of monsters," Emhyr said, sounding exactly as serious as he always did. He was looking at Geralt intently again, the same way he had been in the library, when he'd been telling Geralt about what the ocean had said to him. What it was _still_ saying to him.

"Uh, alright, but you don't have to," Geralt said, a little weakly. He wasn't sure what else he should say in response to the man's too-grave words or his too-keen attention, so he turned back to his food. He tackled it a bit more slowly now, though, and tried to observe Emhyr in return as he did. Emhyr didn't _seem_ like he was suffering from anything like the constant voice of the ocean in his ears. But then again, apparently he'd been dealing with it for longer than Geralt had known him, so why should Geralt be able to detect anything amiss now?

"And what are your plans now?" Emhyr asked, then a moment later clarified, "For your investigation," at Geralt's look of blank incomprehension. "Will you continue searching the library?"

"Sure? Could probably spend months sorting through it all, but a useful piece of information might be just about anywhere, so I'll keep digging. But I think the most likely path forward is with you and your tie to the ocean." He hurried onwards—Emhyr's expression hadn't changed, but Geralt got the strong impression that he'd controlled it deliberately. "I'm sure you're busy, uh, emperor-ing, so I appreciate you making the time today to talk. But I think there's still a lot more ground we could cover. If you could keep freeing up some time…?"

Emhyr nodded once, slowly.

And Geralt should have felt glad, but the emperor was still looking at him in that probing way, and he just felt apprehensive.

"And then?" Emhyr asked, deceptively lightly.

"And then… what?" Geralt asked, wary.

"Have you thought of what you will do afterwards," Emhyr said, "once you have wrung out every drop of information in the library and plumbed the depths of my memories and knowledge?"

What Geralt was going to do _afterwards_ was bring Ciri back. There was something useful somewhere, and he'd find it, even if he had to drag it out of Emhyr bodily. And he'd thought Emhyr was on the same page. He set down his fork, which he'd started gripping tightly enough to bend. "What made you decide to be so helpful all of a sudden?" he asked, as evenly as he could. _"Why_ did you come talk to me earlier?"

There was a brief, crackling silence. And then Emhyr spoke, in a tone that could probably have been called soothing if it wasn't pissing Geralt off so bad by reminding him of someone trying to calm a shying animal. "I was informed that, since the moment you left my office, you had been chasing shadows in the library from dawn to dusk, skipping meals, and using witcher magic to try intimidating the staff into letting you stay through the nights."

"I wasn't!" Geralt said. At least, he wasn't trying to intimidate anyone. He'd just showed them igni! And if he wasn't perfectly capable of skipping meals and missing sleep and still being in good enough shape to cut through hordes of drowners and ghouls, he'd have died a long time ago. "What the fuck?! Chasing _shadows?_ And you decided you had to check on me out of the goodness of your heart, is that it?"

"I am not so unfeeling that I do not recognize that we have both lost someone dear to us. You are having some difficulty accepting the reality of the situation. I had hoped that sharing what I knew would help you apprehend it. But instead you choose to cling to false hopes."

The look of pity on Emhyr's face was infuriating, and it stabbed an involuntary spike of humiliation into Geralt's chest.

Earlier, he'd thought Emhyr had just… come around. But he should have known better than to imagine Emhyr var Emreis could ever be swayed from a path he'd set himself on. The White Flame Dancing on the Graves of His Foes, who'd been the pampered heir of a royal lineage, barely in his teens, freshly turned into a monster and driven into the woods, when he'd set forth on a crusade for vengeance that he'd poured his next decades of life into carrying out. The Ruler of the North and South, who'd just _decided_ one day to conquer the whole damn continent and reshape it to his specifications, and then done it, despite every setback and obstruction that stood in his way.

Emhyr var Emreis, who, after sending armies to chase her across half the world, could somehow give up his daughter for lost in three scant days of absence. No, Geralt thought, remembering the pull of Emhyr's hands on his collar and the raw emotions that had managed to briefly break through the surface. Emhyr had given Ciri up in the ten scant seconds after she'd taken her skin back. That had been all the time he'd needed to grieve and then move the hell on.

And now he was expecting Geralt to do the same.

Emhyr's eyes were boring into him. "Cirilla cared for you deeply. She would not have allowed you to burn yourself out on a lost cause. And she would not have wished it of you, not for her sake. But she is not here any longer, so I must do what I can in her stead."

"Stop talking about her like she's dead!" Geralt slammed his hands onto the table and stood, feeling a vindictive satisfaction mix into the tidal wave of anger when Emhyr flinched reflexively. He wasn't in _denial,_ goddamn it, Emhyr was just a fucking quitter. 'The Relentless,' Geralt's _ass._

"She's _going_ to come back," Geralt snarled at Emhyr, who was now sitting very still, leaning back just a bit from the table and looking up at Geralt. "Even if I _can't_ find anything useful, she'll manage it on her own. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to _try."_

His jaw felt painfully tight. His throat did, too. He couldn't deal with looking at Emhyr's face any longer. He shoved his chair out of his way and headed for the damn exit.

"Just… think on what I've said," Emhyr told him, before Geralt had gotten the door all the way open. He sounded… tired.

The subdued words cut through Geralt's fury, left him feeling powerless. He hated that.

It felt childish suddenly to slam the door, so he just let it swing closed behind him as he walked away.


	3. Chapter 3

Geralt didn't sleep well.

He was plagued by dreams of Ciri stepping through a shining white doorway. He couldn't move or speak, only bear witness. The roar of that unnatural blizzard surrounded him, too loud, louder than it had been that day, drowning everything else out. Then it started… undulating, rising to a fever pitch, then fading, then cresting again, over and over, until he realized, with a slow sort of horror, that the howling of the wind had turned into the sound of ocean waves lapping up on the shore.

When the dawn's light started to peek into the room, he gave up on the effort and sat up in bed with a groan. His head felt annoyingly fuzzy, but he wasn't going to get any _more_ clear-headed carrying on like this.

The library had been where he'd gone every morning for the past few days, lingering in his room only long enough to gulp down the breakfast he'd asked the servants to bring him just before the doors opened each day. That wouldn't be happening for another hour or two, though.

He could've broken in, of course. He could've broken in any day before this, too, but he hadn't been having any trouble resting then, so he hadn't needed to. He'd slept the sleep of the righteous then. Now, he just felt… off-balance.

But, no, he wasn't going to break in. He didn't want the librarians to find him in there and gripe about him to Emhyr again. Or, more likely, gripe about him to each other, and have one of Emhyr's spies overhear and deem it notable enough to put in the emperor's ear, which was probably how it had happened.

Fuck Emhyr, anyway. Acting like he knew everything. Bastard.

Geralt pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, hard. Sure, the library was a long shot. The only thing he was likely to find there was context, not help. But he couldn't do _nothing._ He couldn't just return to the Path knowing he hadn't done every single thing that it was in his power to do.

He climbed out of bed and knelt down on the floor, closing his eyes and willing his jaw to unclench. Maybe some meditation would help him center himself. At the very least, he wouldn't dream anymore.

Meditation wasn't rest, exactly. It could refresh you and restore your energy, but it was too focused a state to be called rest. You had to confront all the things forefront in your mind—your worries, your fears—or else it wouldn't work.

Geralt sank deep into his own head, rotating his thoughts around and piecing together their jagged edges. Didn't try to grind them down or master them. Just squinted at them and tried to see where they fit.

The what-ifs were the hardest to work with, sharp as glass, what if Emhyr was right, what if Ciri was gone for good, what if Geralt once more throwing himself into the fray without all the facts meant he was never going to see her again, what if… But he didn't shy away. There'd been any number of times when he or Ciri might have ended up never seeing each other again—Ciri probably worried about that all the time, that he'd finally bite off more than he could chew and die a witcher's death. It hurt to imagine the reverse, sure, but he wasn't a stranger to hurt. So, why did he think Ciri would come back? Because it was _too_ painful not to believe that? Or was it because there _was_ a way, or at least there _could_ be, and if he didn't believe that, he wouldn't be able to find it?

_They_ wouldn't be able to find it. He didn't imagine his odds were anything but dismal without Emhyr's cooperation. Geralt had meant what he'd said about the emperor's connection to the ocean being their best chance.

But Emhyr had already abandoned hope. He didn't believe there was any way Ciri could return, and if he gave up on Geralt as well, there went even that possibility. Geralt would be out on his ass, with no access to the one real lead he had. He needed to make sure Emhyr would _listen,_ even if he didn't yet _believe._

A tap on the door pulled Geralt back to the world around him. He opened his eyes and pushed himself smoothly to his feet. The sun had risen a bit higher in the sky, which meant that was probably one of the servants at the door with his breakfast. He permitted himself a few seconds to stretch his arms high over his head before he ambled over to let them in.

He felt better, after the meditation. The fog in his head had retreated, and he had a target to pursue.

He ate the tray of food they'd brought for him more slowly that day, actually tasting everything for once, and then when he went out into the hall, instead of turning left to go to the library, he turned right and headed towards Emhyr's office.

The guards didn't make him wait this time, which meant Emhyr had specifically told them to let him in if he showed up. He felt a prick of irritation threaten his hard-won even keel at that—ah, yes, got to make yourself available for the poor delusional witcher's sake—but even he could recognize the thought as kind of uncharitable, not to mention self-defeating. It wasn't like he wasn't happy to use any advantages Emhyr was willing to give him.

The emperor was hard at work today, scribbling something on a sheet of parchment, not staring off at nothing again. He finished writing the sentence he'd been in the middle of before he looked up at Geralt. "Witcher," he said, sounding remarkably cautious, for a man like Emhyr var Emreis.

Maybe it was that caution that prompted him to it, but without quite meaning to, he found himself saying, "You could call me Geralt, you know."

Emhyr was still holding his quill pen in his hand. He blinked once, slowly, without his expression changing at all. Then, finally, he inclined his head slightly, and said, "Geralt, then." And then when Geralt opened his mouth to reply—and he really hadn't been about to return the favor, really!—the emperor followed that up with a severe, "You may _not_ call me Emhyr, however. If you were to do that before any witnesses, I would be required to reprimand you in some fashion, or else invite truly onerous political complications."

"Only in private, then," Geralt replied, cheekily.

Emhyr gave him a dangerous look, so he didn't try his luck by actually _saying_ it. He'd save that for later. Anyway, his restraint seemed enough to pacify Emhyr, who put down his pen in its holder, folded his hands together on the desk in front of him, and then just said, "You look somewhat fatigued, if still in high enough spirits to make jokes. Did you not sleep well?"

"No, not really," Geralt said. "I had a lot to think about."

"Indeed?" Emhyr sounded almost hopeful.

"Yeah. But, no, I didn't come around to your nihilistic worldview, if that's what you're thinking. I just wanted to figure out where we'd gone wrong, see where we can go from here."

Geralt wished he could pull up a chair and sit eye-level with Emhyr again, put them both on somewhat even ground, but there weren't any in the room other than the one Emhyr was sitting in. He briefly considered walking around to the other side of Emhyr's desk and sitting on top of it instead, next to the guy, but he thought that was probably a fraction more of a liberty than the emperor was likely to permit. So, he just stood there in front of the desk, keeping his posture as relaxed and open as he could.

"It seems to me that we've been talking at cross-purposes," he said. "We've both been making assumptions about why the other is saying and doing things. I thought you were on board with trying to find Ciri. You probably meant to give me that impression, I know, but you don't have to try to sneakily dissect me or whatever, to spare my feelings. And I clearly shouldn't be trying to guess what's going on in _your_ head. So, let's just… lay everything on the table, make sure we stay on the same page from here on out. I don't mean you can't have your own interpretations about the things I'm saying. You think I'm in denial? Making shit up to make myself feel better? Fine, that's your prerogative, but just tell me so upfront,"—Geralt could tell from Emhyr's eyebrows twitching that he wanted to interrupt, because of course he'd think being rude in a dungeon was upfront— _"plainly,_ not cryptically through heavy implications. Then I can try explaining—then I'll even _know_ I need to explain myself. Don't just stew in it for days and ask your goddamn spies to confirm your suspicions or whatever so you can spring it on me over dinner."

Emhyr didn't say anything, just studied him with narrowed eyes. That was good. That meant he was considering it. Geralt let him look, and waited.

Finally, the emperor said, resolutely, "I cannot imagine what other explanation there could be for your insistence, against all evidence to the contrary, that there is some solution, save that you are deeply in denial."

Geralt flashed an ironic smile. "What can I say? I'm an optimist."

Emhyr's lips pursed. "It's difficult to see what I'm likely to gain by dealing with you frankly and honestly, when you choose to make flippant remarks like that at every turn."

Well. He had to bite back a too-quick response that would have probably proved Emhyr's point and lost Geralt any chance at the pact for candidness he was trying to seal with the man. "Ask me a serious question, I'll give you a serious answer," he said instead. "Make a _statement_ at me, as though your perspective is the only one that matters, without inviting any disagreement, yeah, I'm gonna tend to be a little snarky. It's not personal or anything. Sometimes you have to be flippant when you're dealing with monsters and death all the time. Keeps a witcher sane."

Emhyr looked like he still had reservations about Geralt's sanity, but he just said, "Very well. Then I ask you: what shred of proof do you have that there is any way back to land for a selkie that has heeded the ocean's call?"

"Nothing concrete," Geralt admitted. No point pussyfooting about it. "No documented cases outside an old book that compiled legends that had probably already changed a hundred times in the telling. No secret spells or prophecies. If I had anything like that, I would've told you.

"What I _do_ have, though, is a hundred years' experience with monsters and magic and the instincts I've developed over time about them. There's usually this… consistent internal logic to how any creature works. I don't have to know everything about selkies to see where the logic falls apart in what I'm being told about them. It just doesn't make sense for anything to have the ability to live among humans unnoticed, and even be able to, uh…" Geralt paused, a little awkwardly, before forging on. "…well, _breed_ with humans, but then have an ingrained instinct driving them to never return to the land ever again, the one place those abilities are at all useful. Why would they be able to do any of that in the first place? Stands to reason that selkies _should_ be able to go back and forth. Maybe not _freely,_ but at least more than once over the course of their lives."

"That is not much to stake one's hopes on. The rationality of magic."

Emhyr sounded flatly unconvinced, which was annoying, because Geralt had thought he'd been doing a pretty good job with that explanation, even despite the slight pounding in his temple that was starting to come back. He wished he'd been able to get some damn sleep. "People think magic is capable of anything, but it's got rules and limitations, same as everything else."

"Hm," Emhyr said, then inexplicably asked, "What of… frogs?"

"Huh?"

"Frogs live on land, but are obliged to lay their eggs in the water. They spend their early lives there in the manner of a fish, until they lose that ability. Is it not possible that selkies breed and develop in a similar fashion, but with land and water reversed?" He seemed perfectly at ease comparing himself to a frog—or maybe the idea of selkies and the idea of himself were distant enough still that it didn't bother him.

Geralt wondered suddenly if Emhyr actually thought of himself as human. But he didn't ask that, not yet. "Adult frogs can still breathe underwater, though. Well, sort of. They lose their gills, but they're still able to absorb oxygen from the water through their skin." He only knew that because he'd once read a text about a particular type of amphibious monster, which the author had been breeding in vats in order to observe their development stages, comparing and contrasting them to frogs'. The study had been published posthumously. "They can stay underwater just fine for months. Maybe indefinitely. And they can go back and forth whenever they want."

"…Truly?"

Geralt nodded.

"Curious." Emhyr mulled on this for a few moments, then said, "To my knowledge, no witcher has ever been privy to my family's secret, but mages have been consulted in the past. It is difficult to believe your expertise on these matters might exceed theirs, but perhaps I do not know enough on the subject to judge."

"Uh… thanks?" Geralt's eyebrows flew up. "Wait, _mages?_ Who?! When?! Maybe they have some information we could use!" Emhyr had been going on and on about how big a secret this had been, and yet they'd talked to _mages?_

But Emhyr was already shaking his head. "My grandfather brought in several mages to aid in an attempt to recover his sister, perhaps a century ago now. But he was somewhat intemperate in his methods. As a safeguard, they were all executed afterwards, and not permitted to leave any record of their findings. Which amounted to nothing, in any case."

Geralt squinted at him. "You're not going to have _me_ executed, are you?"

"For what purpose? To preserve the secret for the paltry decades I might have left to me? My line has ended, as far as the surface world is concerned."

"Well, not if we get Ciri back…"

Emhyr looked faintly aggrieved. "If by some miracle you are able to return my heir to me, I give my word that I will not have you executed for it afterwards. I will trust to your discretion, for Cirilla's safety if nothing else."

It was a good sign that Emhyr was now allowing himself to consider the possibility of Ciri's return, even in the hypothetical. Geralt held back a grin, unreasonably giddy. "I'll hold you to that. And I wasn't going to go blabbing, anyway. Witchers don't gossip like mages do." Well, except for Lambert… "And, yeah, we have different skillsets, so I don't think a couple mages not cracking it means we're out of luck. Mages are more likely to be able to figure out how a spell was cast or how it works, but breaking enchantments is a witcher's bread and butter. Don't always need to know how they happened, or why."

Geralt remembered something suddenly. "This is what I was talking about! In the library. You were describing your connection to the ocean and I was trying to explain how it might be useful. Just before we were interrupted."

"Ah. When you began to babble nonsense to disguise your lack of an actual solution."

Geralt frowned and looked at him meaningfully. Emhyr had been doing so well up to this point with not being such a dismissive, self-righteous asshole about things.

Emhyr took a deep breath, and then rephrased. "Do you mean, perchance, that moment when I _believed_ you were beginning to babble nonsense to disguise your lack of an actual solution?"

"See? Was that so hard?"

In the time it took him to say that, Emhyr had gone from looking mildly annoyed to profoundly vexed. 

"…whoops," Geralt said. "Flippant?"

_"Exceedingly."_

"Sorry about that." Geralt scratched the back of his head a little sheepishly. A serious answer in exchange for a serious question, even if it was an _insulting_ question. That was what he'd promised. "I'll admit I wasn't the clearest I could've been. Wasn't exactly prepared to give a lecture on the fundamentals of curse-breaking. Been a while since I had to, and I've never been the greatest at it. The teaching, I mean, not the curse-breaking. Vesemir did most of the conceptual lessons with Ciri."

He tried to decide where the best place to begin would be, but his head was really pounding now. And he'd been standing up in the same position for a bit long. He _could_ stand however long he needed to, if it was somehow necessary for killing a monster, but normally he'd post up against a tree or behind a rock or something. The combined discomfort of the headache and not being able to take a damn load off was making it harder to think. He remembered starting with conduit theory in the library, probably because it had been the idea most directly related to what Emhyr had said, but that really needed to be prefaced with a few other concepts. He pressed his thumb into his right temple, shifted his weight, and said, "Um, so there's many types of curses, but when you get down to it, they're not any different from any other enchantment—it's just that their effect is negative. So we should probably start with the base components of an enchantment? There's the… This would probably work better with an example… Mostly witchers know signs already before we learn this shit. You don't know any magic, do you?" He was pretty sure Emhyr didn't, but the man _had_ turned out to have been a magical creature this whole time, so.

"I do not," Emhyr confirmed. He had that probing look on his face again, which, hell, what was he thinking now? But Geralt didn't have enough time to accuse him of being secretive again before he said, "But, you are not at your best—or so it appears. Go, rest. You have explained your position adequately. You may attempt this lesson later, when you are better prepared." He waved a hand in dismissal.

Geralt's own hand lowered from his head. An unlooked-for surge of gratitude was washing over him, and now that the option had been presented, he wanted more than anything to just go and collapse in bed and close his eyes. But there was still something important that needed to be said. "So you're convinced that I know what I'm talking about? That we might be able to help Ciri?"

Emhyr didn't respond immediately. He looked down at his desk, but he wasn't reading any of the papers on it. When he looked back up, he locked eyes with Geralt, and then said, steadily, "I am not convinced that you are not chasing an impossibility. But I will hold to the bargain you have proposed. Honesty and consideration in equal measure, from both parties. We will not conceal our thoughts on this matter from each other, and we will each give all those thoughts fair evaluation." He raised his eyebrows, and waited for Geralt's wordless nod. "Then it is agreed. My hope is that, in this manner, you can be convinced to accept Cirilla's loss and move on from it."

Emhyr took everything so very seriously, all the time. Geralt felt like they were conducting a ritual, making an unbreakable vow. Like the universe would take notice and prove one of them right. "And mine is that you can be convinced to hope, and that we can bring her back, together," he said.

He kept his eyes closed most of the way back to his room. He knew the way, and he could hear the heartbeats of the guards stationed along the hallways, so he could use them to keep himself oriented when he made turns. By the time he got inside the door, the headache had subsided enough to only be a minor pain in the ass again.

He shut the curtains to block out the sun—it was still morning, after all. Then he pulled off his clothes and flopped into bed, hands tucked behind his head. He let out a deep sigh, and then grinned, half-unwillingly. _'Honesty and consideration in equal measure, from both parties.'_ That was what Emhyr had gotten out of Geralt's insistence that they just stop… fucking around, concealing things and making assumptions. He'd dug into the heart of what Geralt wanted, and then made it sound… grand, almost. Like a promise made in a ballad, not in reality.

Emhyr was… really something, Geralt thought, as he drifted off to sleep.


End file.
